Census Funding Cuts Might Cost Rural America Billions

[Judi Lynn]

12/21/2017 05:17 pm ET

“With undercounted communities receiving less than their fair share of public funds, there will be undue economic pressure in rural communities, many of which are already struggling.”

By Sam Levine

People living in rural areas, particularly in minority communities, are among those that could be most severely affected by underfunding and a lack of preparation for the 2020 Census, a new report highlights.

Census officials have long had difficulty in counting Americans in rural areas, but the challenge could be exacerbated in 2020 by a new focus on getting Americans to respond to the Census using the internet. The rural areas where people are traditionally hard to count have lower internet access and use rates than the rest of the country, according to the report, which was written by demographer William O’Hare for the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

Failure to accurately count Americans living in rural areas would have significant consequences. Census data is used to determine how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal assistance are allocated. The data is also used to establish how electoral boundaries are drawn, determining how Americans are represented in Congress and statehouses across the country.

O’Hare identified hard-to-count counties as those places that had the lowest rates of mail return responses in the 2010 Census. His analysis showed “the more rural a county is, the higher the likelihood that it is among the hard-to-count.” A “substantial share” of those hard-to-count people are in places like the Deep South, Southwest and on Indian reservations in areas where African-Americans, hispanics and American Indians make up a majority of the population.

More:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/census-funding-rural-america_us_5a3c24f7e4b06d1621b307bc?section=us_politics

[bettyellen]

1. Thats a great idea for a grass roots project. Wish the ALCU would help organize it.

[msongs]

2. census process is bloated and invasive. feds have turned a simple head count into a complex interrog

interrogation for things the govt has no business knowing in order to determine how many people live in this country (it could just call the IRS to get a lot of this stuff)

This interrogation is staffed by a hugely oversized army of government employees.

[dugog55]

3. No need to worry

After the tax cuts take place, there will no longer be hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal Assistance to hand out. The Red States true to Trump will get their small cut first and the Blue States will get the crumbs. There still has been no Federal Aid to California for all their fire damage. I do not think Trump has even mentioned the devastation there.